- Amazon services disrupted across U.S., affecting more than 22,700 users
- Downdetector reports outages including checkout failures and mobile app crashes
- Service largely restored later as incident reports drop significantly
- Amazon says cause of disruption not yet disclosed
Largely, the e-commerce site of Amazon was brought back on Thursday, following service outage of tens of thousands of its users in the United States, according to the outage tracking reporting data and company press releases. The outage started in the midday and very soon caused a rapidly growing number of user complaints on monitoring platform Downdetector, which collects reports of issues with the service by users on online platforms. Its peak was reached with over 22,700 people stating issues with accessing Amazon services.
Towards the end of the afternoon the cases reported had declined drastically. According to Downdetector data, less than 1700 active reports were recorded by 4:13 pm Mountain time, meaning that the bulk of the systems were back to normal functioning. The firm had realized the disruption earlier in the day.
We regret that there are customers who might be having problems during shopping. An Amazon spokesperson said, "We understand our customers are patient and we are trying to fix the problem. Reports said that the number of users that are affected will not necessarily be the same as what is reported by Downdetector since the platform uses voluntary reports of individuals with issues reported to it.
The users report checkout failures and crashes of applications. During the outage, customers went to social media to share various issues such as unsuccessful checkout, changing product prices, and inability to temporarily see order history or product web pages. Some users also complained of crashing of mobile applications as they browsed the platform and the others complained that the site was either slow or it was not able to carry out transactions.
Certain disruptions seemed to be outside the main retail site. Downdetector also registered limited problems with both Prime Video and the cloud computing arm of the company Amazon Web Services. But Amazon was not quick to give the details about the root of the problem that caused the outage.
According to industry observers, these cases underscore the difficulties associated with running global digital platforms serving hundreds of millions of users and conducting huge amounts of transactions within an hour. Even minor interruptions may impact the shopping activities, processing and logistics services in payments and operations in various markets.
Outages Point To Increasing Reliance On Cloud Infrastructure
The recent outage is less than six months following a giant Amazon outage in October 2025 which led to globally widespread disruption. The previous event impacted many of the digital services based on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure causing thousands of applications, payment systems, and workplace platforms to be shut down temporarily across the globe.
Since an impressive percentage of the internet backbone is run by AWS, however, failure can spread to industries including but not limited to finance and media, transportation, and healthcare. The Reuters reported that the outage of 2025 caused some firms to temporarily shut down because of the failure of vital software tools and inner communication systems.
According to technology experts, the trend of digital service concentration in the hands of a few cloud providers has worsened the systemic effect of outages as they happen. AWS is considered the biggest cloud computing infrastructure in the world when it competes with platforms run by Microsoft and Google. According to the estimates of market research firms, AWS has a market share of about one-third of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market with millions of customer bases all over the world.
Geopolitical Risks Provoke Stress on the Digital Infrastructure
The disruption is also timed when there is a high level of geopolitical tensions to technology infrastructure of the world. Apparently, this time last week, drone attacks hit some Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain affecting some cloud services, which are also involved in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Although Amazon did not substantiate those incidences as being related to the disruption on Thursday, the incidences have illuminated the weakness of mass digital infrastructure, when it comes to withstanding geopolitical crises.
Cloud systems today work under systems of data centers located on different continents, and they form a very important part of international trade, communication and finances. Due to online retail, streaming and enterprise computing being more and more reliant on cloud infrastructure, business can be impacted, as well as consumers and government agencies all at the same time, by service interruptions.
The systems of Amazon were mostly restored later in the day, and most users could get access to the shopping platform of the company once again. The technical cause of the outage is yet to be revealed by the company.
